CARRIER 3: ARMAGEDDON MODE

And that deadliness was beginning to take its toll. Vaughn had long since lost track of how many Indian aircraft had been destroyed. Eight or ten in the dogfight with the American fighters, certainly, and at least twenty more had fallen victim to the implacable hunger of the Standard missiles as they stalked the radar reflections of their prey and hunted them down.

It was a close-run thing toward the end. Indian aircraft were actually coming in over the horizon, and the Vicksburg’& two

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five-inch turrets swung about and began slamming shells at the attackers. Vaughn watched the forward turret hammering away on the TV screen in CIC. In the distance, he could see the black specks that he knew were enemy planes, the brack smears of triple-A and exploding aircraft, the smoky streak of a plane falling across the sky. A Jaguar howled past, long, black cigar shapes spilling from its belly as the carrier’s point defenses swung to meet the new threat. Splashes rose off Jefferson’s port bow, thunderous avalanches of water. The Jaguar disintegrated in midair; the bombs missed.

In World War II, the face of war was changed forever when ships began striking at each other with carrier aircraft. Fleets maneuvered, came to grips, and sank one another . . . and the opposing ships never came within sight of each other directly.

Modem war, Vaughn had always been told, was to have taken that separation of the combatants another step. Ships would be struck and sunk by missiles launched by aircraft safely over the horizon. Enemy aircraft would never even appear in the skies over a naval squadron.

The Falklands campaign had proven the fallacy of that prediction, though the presence and terrain of those islands had shaped the battle to a large extent. Here in the Arabian Sea, it was the sheer numbers of the Indian attackers that carried them past the outer defenses and into range of the ship’s guns.

Vaughn watched the struggle unfolding on the television monitor and thought of World War II. The scenes there looked like something out of a fifty-year-old newsreel.

«59 hours, 26 March Soviet aircraft carrier Kreml

Following the Western design philosophy in arming their first nuclear aircraft carrier, Kreml was not as heavily armed as the Kiev-class cruiser-carrier hybrids. The weapons mix did reflect Soviet concern about antiship missiles, however, for she earned a number of Gatling-type rapid-fire cannons designed to defeat incoming ASMs. Designed to operate much like the Phalanx, the 30-mm multi-barrel gun designated as AK-630 was housed in a squat, gray turret unlike the white silo of the American CIWS.

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The six barrels were housed together in a single rotating tube. The weapon had a theoretical rate of fire •of 3000 rounds per minute, but problems caused by overheating and the tendency of the ammunition to jam reduced this to short bursts of one or two hundred rounds apiece.

The missiles entered Kreml’s inner defensive zone, spread out now across a wide stretch of sea and skimming scant meters above the wave tops. Two of Kreml’s AK-630s began firing . . . then a third, and a fourth, all the point defense turrets that could bear on the tiny, elusive targets now spread across the horizon astern. Splashes on the sea, cascades of white spray, marked where the high-velocity rounds lashed out at the approaching ship-killers.

On the carrier* s deck all was noise and confusion, as officers shouted orders and the CIWS Catlings shrieked like chain saws. The heavy thumps of chaff launchers mingled with the chaos with a steady, rhythmic beat. Clouds of chaff surrounded the carrier as the Catlings continued to track and fire, track and fire and fire and fire. . . .

The Sea Eagles were approaching Kreml from almost dead astern. In the last minute of the engagement, Captain Soni made one serious tactical mistake by deciding to maintain his course, rather than maneuvering to give either his port or starboard batteries a clearer field of fire. When the missiles first came within range, four separate CIWS turrets could bear on them, two to starboard, one aft, and one to port. By deciding to hold the carrier to its northwesterly course, he hoped to provide the CIWS turrets with a less complicated firing solution.

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